Harry's Place

This is a crosspost by Shiraz Maher from Standpoint

The Sunday Telegraph is full of stories about the Islamic Forum of Europe’s (IFE) growing influence in East London. It says the group has effectively infiltrated the local Labour Party and brought extraordinary pressure to bear on the local council, Tower Hamlets, where a number of the [...]

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. [...]

The Sunday Telegraph has published four articles about the Islamic Forum of Europe’s baleful influence on politics in East London.
The IFE is closely linked to Jamaat-e-Islami, a South Asian Islamist group. For a look into its thinking, see this speech last week by its leader Syed Munawar Hasan:
The JI chief said that in order [...]

Despite what all the sceptics have said I’ve always suspected that as the General Election drew closer the Tory lead would continue to shrink as nagging doubts about the ability of an inexperienced Tory front bench to run the country in the face of such a deep recession bit home. And shrink it has.
The Sunday [...]

The National Public Radio program “On the Media” has an interview with John Kampfner, head of Index on Censorship, about how the UK– because of its extremely plaintiff-friendly libel laws– has become a favorite destination for foreigners who want to sue other foreigners. He suggests needed reform is on the way. Let’s hope so.

Earlier this week Moazzam Begg was due to address the SOAS Islamic Society. His topic was “Justice in Islam”.
He didn’t show up and was replaced by Humza Qureshi of Cageprisoners.
I understand from a SOAS student who attended the talk that Qureshi said people should be brought together according to their religious beliefs rather than [...]

This has appeared on the website of the “Stop the War Coalition”:

The petition was set up by the hate publishers of the Palestine Telegraph.
They are the purveyors of the version of the Haiti blood libel that Tonge read. It prompted her to call for an “inquiry” in response to obvious racist lunacy. The [...]

I’m sure that we have all got used to being told that fascism (and Nazism in particular) are left-wing phenomena. There is some truth to this idea (in as much as successful fascist movements have generally needed to develop a populist appeal at some stage during their rise to power) but it totally ignores any [...]

Amnesty International members in the UK who have been disturbed by the organization’s suspension of Gita Sahgal, and its obsession with Israel while virtually ignoring countries with far worse human rights records, have three choices:
–Hope that things will change for the better.
–Quit in disgust.
–Remain a member while working to change things from the inside.
To his [...]

In his political memoirs, The Prophet’s Children: Travels on the American Left ([Humanities Press, 1994], p. 28), Tim Wohlforth reports on the first “Saturday-night social” gathering that he attended of the Independent Socialist League and its youth wing, the Young Socialist League. This was in 1955:
Hal [Draper] and [his wife] Anne went over to the [...]